4 ways to find your lost iPhone (and keep it from getting lost again)

4 ways to find your lost iPhone (and keep it from getting lost again)

2014 is just waking up and its house is trashed. There are champagne stains on the carpet, and its iPhone is nowhere to be found. Yikes. If you've followed in the New Year's footsteps and similarly misplaced your pricey pocket computer, there are a few things you can do to find it and prevent an unfortunate instance from ever happening again.

Find My iPhone is a good bet if you had a night on the town and can't find your handset the next morning. It tracks the path of your iPhone and shows you its current GPS location while also notifying anyone who found the phone that it is indeed lost.

For even more nuanced location data, GPS Phone Tracker is a great alternative. You can set the app to log your phone's location as often as every two minutes, which will give you the best chance of finding your phone's current location as well as how it got there. You can set up permissions for friends or other trusted users to view your phone's location, so you'll always have someone who knows where your phone is.

Where's My Cellphone is a simple website that will call your phone for you. You can time the call or have it ring immediately, which is handy if you need to check your car or other location (far from your computer) for the device. The site has been used more than 14 million times already, and it will continue to be a go-to for the foreseeable future.

If you find that you're losing your iPhone on a daily basis, you can go all-out and buy a protective case that also helps you locate the device. BiKN is a system of tags that go on important objects -- like your keys, purse, etc. They locate each other by activating alert tones. If you can find one of the objects you have a BiKN on, you can find them all. The iPhone case works hand in hand with the BiKN app to both help you find your important stuff, and have your important stuff find your iPhone for you.